


Geological Formations

by Philosopher_King



Series: The Three-Body Problem [1]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Aang is also the little spoon, F/M, I'm not tagging underage, Literal Sleeping Together, M/M, Post-Canon, Scars, Smoke and Shadow Comics (Avatar), The Promise Comics (Avatar), Zuko is the little spoon, Zuko's Scar (Avatar), and anyway there's no sex, because the age difference isn't that big
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-25
Updated: 2020-02-25
Packaged: 2021-02-28 01:26:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22895620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Philosopher_King/pseuds/Philosopher_King
Summary: After the tumultuous weeks when Azula and her 'Kemurikage' terrorized the Fire Nation Capital, after Fire Lord Zuko apologizes for his tyrannical reaction and promises to do better, he and Aang withdraw to talk in private. Aang suggests a new way for him to think of his scar.
Relationships: Aang/Katara (Avatar), Aang/Katara/Zuko (Avatar), Aang/Zuko (Avatar)
Series: The Three-Body Problem [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1652515
Comments: 20
Kudos: 380





	Geological Formations

**Author's Note:**

> As noted in the tags, this takes place after the "Smoke and Shadow" comics, so Aang is 16 and Zuko is not quite 20 (based on when I've decided their birthdays are). If you're uncomfortable with people of those ages kissing, you know where to find the back button.
> 
> [Elia_L_Riddle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elia_L_Riddle/pseuds/Elia_L_Riddle) has very kindly translated this fic into Russian! Her translation can be found [here](https://ficbook.net/readfic/9740556).

“Security and freedom exist in a delicate balance. I did not maintain that balance well. My recent decisions were based not on reason, not on wisdom, but on fear. For that, I ask your forgiveness. You should never feel like prisoners in your own city, or suspects in your own homes. I resolve to do better. I will continue striving to be a Fire Lord worthy of you. I’m grateful for your patience. I’m grateful for your trust.”

Zuko stood with his head bowed while the crowd applauded—not politely or perfunctorily, Aang noted with relief, but sincerely, enthusiastically. Before the applause had died down, Zuko raised his head again, gave a small nod of acknowledgment, and turned to walk back inside. He paused first to exchange meaningful nods of apology and forgiveness with Constable Sung, then to look toward the Kyoshi Warriors who stood at attention on the other side of the arcade. Suki saluted him by earnestly placing a fist over her heart; Ty Lee, less decorous, used her fist to give him a small, silent cheer in the air in front of her chest.

Finally, he looked to Aang, who bowed with his fist below his extended palm, in the Fire Nation custom. Zuko shook his head ever so slightly: he didn’t want Aang’s homage. Then he gave a subtle twitch of his head to indicate that Aang should follow him inside.

“That was a very brave thing you just did,” Aang said, trotting a little to keep up with Zuko’s brisk, long-legged strides.

“I’m trying,” Zuko replied, turning to give him an apologetic smile. He opened the door to a small sitting room with a view onto the garden in an inner courtyard. He pulled off the stiff leather collar and heavy black velvet cloak of the Fire Lord’s station with a sigh of relief and tossed them carelessly onto a sideboard table, then opened a cabinet under the sideboard and took out two glasses and a bottle of plum brandy.

“I don’t—”

“Drink. Of course you don’t. Tea?” He rummaged some more in the cabinet, found a teapot and some tea leaves, filled the pot from a tap with instantly hot water (the Fire Nation’s technology never ceased to astonish), and then came up with a somewhat dusty teacup.

Aang cleaned out the teacup with a bending-enhanced puff of air, sneezed, and said “Thanks.” Zuko poured himself a glass of the plum brandy (rather a lot, Aang thought, but he couldn’t confidently judge) and flung himself down heavily on a velvet-upholstered sofa (blood-red, to match the rest of the Fire Nation). Aang set the teapot and cup down on a little table on the other side of the sofa and sat down, companionably close to his sprawled-out friend.

“You know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you do anything that _wasn’t_ brave,” Aang remarked, picking up the earlier thread of conversation.

Zuko turned toward him, glass at his lips and eyebrow raised. “Really? Even when I turned against you and my uncle and helped my sister bring you down?”

“It wasn’t the brav _est_ thing you could have done,” Aang acknowledged. “But it still took courage to trust that Azula wouldn’t turn on you again. And it took courage to come back and face your father and your old life again, after everything that had happened.”

“Hmph.” Zuko tapped a nail restlessly against his glass. “What about when I made you promise to kill me so I wouldn’t have to keep struggling against my worst instincts?”

“Again, not the bravest possible choice, but still brave. It takes courage to trust someone else with that kind of decision, though not as much as it takes to trust yourself.” Aang hesitated, then placed a cautious hand on his friend’s forearm. “It takes courage to lay down your life, though not as much as it takes to fight for it.”

Zuko looked down at Aang’s hand and then over to his earnest face and gave him a lopsided smile. “You’ve gotten pretty good at the Avatar wisdom thing.”

“You think so?”

“Yeah. You’re starting to sound like my uncle.”

Aang bowed his head with mock solemnity. “You could pay me no higher compliment, your Fire Lordship.”

Zuko snorted. Aang gave his arm a last amiable pat and then removed his hand to take a sip of his tea. Zuko sighed heavily, leaned back against the couch with his eyes closed, and took a long drink of brandy, then grimaced; clearly he wasn’t drinking it for the taste.

Aang looked long and thoughtfully at his friend’s pale, haggard face, the lines around his tight, downturned mouth, the bruise-like shadow under his unmarked eye. The hollows under his cheekbones seemed to have deepened—had he been losing weight? It was hard to tell under the heavy robes of his office.

“Are you all right?” Aang asked seriously. “You don’t look so good.”

Zuko opened his eyes again. “I’m exhausted. I don’t think I’ve had a good night’s sleep in… weeks. Have I slept at all in the last two days…? I might have nodded off for a few minutes in a meeting…” He looked sidelong at Aang. “You’re not looking too great yourself. You probably haven’t been sleeping much, either.”

“Thanks, buddy,” Aang said dryly. “But it’s not just that. I meant… you don’t just look tired. You look… sad.”

“Oh.” Zuko looked down at his drink.

“I’m sorry about… everything with Mai.”

Zuko sighed again. “It’s my own fault for not being open with her. Not trusting her. I’m happy for her, that she’s moved on.” Aang suspected he was saying what he wanted to feel, or thought he should feel, not what he actually felt. “I know I need to move on, too, and let it go. Let _her_ go.”

“All that may be true… but you’re still allowed to be sad.”

Zuko gave him a small, rueful smile, then looked down again, pensive. Aang sat in patient silence while he gathered his thoughts.

“You know,” he began slowly, “I never thought Mai would want me back, after…”

“…after your father banished you?” Aang suggested gently once the pause had gone on a little too long.

“Well, that, too. But I meant… looking like this.” Zuko touched the darkest part of his scar, just under his left eye. “I didn’t think anyone would want me.” He paused, then began again, abruptly: “There was this girl in Ba Sing Se, an Earth Kingdom girl, who had lost her home in the war… she thought I was a refugee, a victim of Fire Nation violence, just like her.”

“You were,” Aang murmured. Zuko glanced at him briefly, then continued as if he hadn’t spoken.

“The scar allowed her to tell a story about me that she wanted to be true,” he said—an indirect denial of Aang’s assertion. “It let her see me as the person she wanted me to be. But Mai knew what it really was, what it said about me—at least as far as the Fire Nation was concerned. And she never said a thing about it. She took me back anyway, picked up right where we left off, as if nothing had changed.”

“You _are_ still a very handsome boy—” _‘Boy’?_ interrupted an incredulous voice in Aang’s head. _Zuko is what, nineteen, twenty?_ “—man—” he corrected himself, and another skeptical voice scoffed, _That sounds awfully grandiose. Are you talking about the hero of a romantic drama?_ “—person,” he finished lamely.

Zuko’s right eyebrow furrowed briefly in confusion. _Smoothly done, Mr. Articulate_ , said the internal voice, which sounded a lot like Sokka when it was being sarcastic.

“I did get pretty good bone structure from both sides of my family,” Zuko admitted with a sly half-smile. “That can make up for a lot.”

Aang shook his head emphatically. “You don’t need to _make up for_ anything,” he insisted.

He didn’t know what possessed him to reach up and touch the lower edge of the scar below Zuko’s cheekbone. Zuko flinched but didn’t pull away, so Aang kept running his fingertips up along the line of his cheekbone toward his temple, tracing the smooth little bumps and prominent ridges, learning their topology. He was seeing it not as damaged and re-healed flesh, but as a manifold of colors and textures that could be interpreted as anything—perhaps as a roughly polished gemstone, with an exterior of rose quartz or marble and an inner ring of jasper or cinnabar around a golden tiger’s-eye center.

“Stop thinking of it as a scar, a disfigurement—something that’s wrong with you, that shouldn’t be there,” Aang said, meeting Zuko’s apprehensive gaze, fingers still lightly framing his narrowed left eye. “Think of it just as another part of you: a landmark; a geological formation. Like layers of volcanic rock…”

“The skin did melt a bit like lava,” Zuko interjected bitterly.

“…or a cliffside polished by a river’s floods. In itself, viewed as just—a _thing_ , an object, it’s nothing bad. In fact, it’s beautiful. You’re beautiful _with_ it, not in spite of it.”

“You think I’m beautiful?” Zuko said playfully, with a crooked smile.

“Of course I do.”

Aang wasn’t the one who had been drinking, or who had recently been broken up with, but somehow he found himself pulled in as if he were a compass needle and Zuko was North (for all that Zuko had thought he needed Aang to be his moral compass—and Katara was at the South Pole even now), or he was the water in a pool and Zuko had suddenly learned to waterbend (like Katara had always bent him to her—and hadn’t Iroh said that channeling lightning was like waterbending?). With his right hand still tracing the fire-made landforms of Zuko’s scar, he brought his left hand to the other side of his one-time enemy’s face and surged up to kiss him.

Zuko froze, but only for a second. He dropped his not-quite-empty glass—brandy spilled down the front of the sofa before the glass landed with a soft thud on the carpet—then wrapped his arms around Aang’s back, one hand gripping his bare shoulder with a touch that sparked like lightning, and returned the kiss even more fiercely. And now it was obvious that Zuko was a firebender, because he was igniting a sharp heat in Aang’s stomach that he had never felt before: with Katara it was always a steady warmth pooled in his chest, a soft tender ache, not this urgent hunger—

_Katara._ The thought finally broke through the roar in his mind and body with a stab of guilt, and it was just as Guru Pathik had said: guilt very effectively blocked the pleasure chakra. Aang pulled away just as suddenly as he had felt himself pulled in, dropping his hands from Zuko’s face to his shoulders. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know why I did that.”

Zuko’s arms were still around him, his touch on Aang’s shoulder blade sending a confused signal of guilt and pleasure at once. “I’m not objecting,” Zuko said with eyebrow raised.

Aang pushed lightly against Zuko’s shoulders, signaling him to release his hold, and Aang moved back toward the end of the couch where his tea was getting cold and overbrewed. “I know. But I shouldn’t have…”

“Katara.” Zuko’s voice was not bitter or accusing, but understanding, a touch resigned.

Aang nodded, eyes downcast. “I love her. I want to spend my life with her. I don’t know why I…” _Why I risked throwing it away on a mad impulse._

Zuko sighed. He looked around for his glass, spotted it on the carpet, muttered “That was lucky,” picked it up and walked back to the sideboard where the brandy bottle and the other glass still stood. He poured some more brandy into the clean glass and took a long sip before he sat back down on the sofa, at some distance from Aang.

“We’ve been through a lot, you and I,” he said at last. “Including some things that you didn’t go through with Katara.”

“You and Katara went through some things that I wasn’t there for,” Aang pointed out. “Should I be worried?” he asked with a quirk of his mouth.

“No,” Zuko said seriously. “Your bond with her isn’t like mine with you—or with her. I’m not a threat to what you have with her, even if we did—more than what we just did. I don’t begrudge it—though maybe I do envy it, a little.”

“I’m not sure Katara would agree that you aren’t a threat, if we did… anything.”

“You’re probably right.” Zuko looked down regretfully at his brandy glass and then drained it. Mostly looking for something to do, Aang took a sip of his tea, then made a face. It was, indeed, stone-cold.

Zuko stood up again to walk his empty glass back to the sideboard. He stood facing the wall for a few silent moments, then turned abruptly back toward Aang. “I’m dead tired, but I’ve been having trouble sleeping,” he said. “Would you—would you come to bed with me? Just to sleep. I think… I think I need someone there.”

Aang stood up and went to him, put a hand on his shoulder. “Of course,” he said.

Zuko nodded briskly, then led Aang along some more corridors and up a flight of stairs to a closed door. “This isn’t the Fire Lord’s chambers,” he explained as he pushed the door open. “It’s my childhood bedroom. I still take naps here sometimes—or try to—without the Kyoshi Warriors standing guard.”

He took the flame-shaped crown pin out of his hair, unbound it, and shook it out. He shed what seemed like endless layers of ceremonial finery—gold-trimmed leather gauntlets and boots, rich velvet robe and pantaloons—until he was wearing just a simple short-sleeved shirt and leggings of fine-woven clay-red linen. Then he pulled back the covers, climbed in, and turned toward Aang, inviting him to follow.

Aang slid under the bedclothes with his friend and adjusted them to cover them both securely. He brushed Zuko’s hair back from his forehead to place a kiss there—the benediction of a fond protector, for all that he was four years younger—and then kissed him lightly, chastely, on the lips. “I love you, too, you know,” he said. “Differently… but still.”

“I know,” said Zuko. He didn’t return the avowal, but Aang knew well that he returned the commitment. Zuko turned away from Aang to sleep, and Aang fit himself along his friend’s back. _Like yin and yang_ , he thought. _Ocean and moon. Is he sure he’s not a waterbender?_

“Thanks,” came Zuko’s muffled voice. “I missed having Mai there.”

“I _knew_ you’d be the little spoon,” Aang teased him.

“I wouldn’t have taken you for a big spoon,” Zuko retorted.

“I’m not,” Aang admitted freely. “But I’ll make an exception for a friend in need.”

“Very generous of you.”

“Go to sleep, little spoon.”

“Good night, little big spoon.”

Aang smiled into Zuko’s hair, breathing in its smell of smoke and sunlight. Katara’s hair smelled like ocean breezes and night-blooming flowers. He didn’t feel guilty thinking of her now. _I’m the Avatar_ , he reasoned with himself, _master of all the elements. Why shouldn’t I love them both?_

**Author's Note:**

> I know Buddhists aren't Existentialists, but Aang seemed like the right person to voice some Existentialist ideas about the conceptualization of objects, which you can find dramatized in Sartre's _Nausea_ , but also in the _Firefly_ episode "Objects in Space."


End file.
